


Home

by teamfreewilll



Series: Paper Cranes [1]
Category: Prison Break
Genre: Comfort, Episode: s05e09 Behind the Eyes, F/M, Michael Scofield Comes Home, Sara Tancredi Is Happy About It, Slight Smut, episode coda, season five
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:00:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26079130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teamfreewilll/pseuds/teamfreewilll
Summary: After everything is all said and done, Sara takes Michael home.
Relationships: Michael Scofield/Sara Tancredi
Series: Paper Cranes [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1894243
Comments: 10
Kudos: 27





	Home

It only occurs to Sara when she’s standing on the front porch of the home she shared with Jacob, that she hasn’t been back since this all began. That the last time she stepped foot out of this house, she was married to Jacob Ness, and she’s returning with her dead husband trailing along behind her and Mike. She’s noticed him doing that, ever since they had reunited, once Michael had been freed and he’d come back to them. He kept walking a few steps behind them both, like he was unsure whether he deserved to step in line with them. Sara wants to grab his hand and pull him close to her, let him know that it’s okay, that there’d always been a Michael Scofield shaped hole in the family. She doesn’t know what he has been through in the seven years since she’d left him behind in Miami-Dade, physically or mentally, so she doesn’t want to push him at all. Doesn’t want to risk pushing him further away by accident, so she lets him hover. Patting down her pockets, she retrieves her keys from her jeans and unlocks the door, letting Mike go in ahead of her. Poor kid’s dead on his feet, and she can’t blame him, it had been a hell of a day. He’s dealt with more in the past couple of days than any child should ever have to deal with in a lifetime.

“Okay, upstairs. brush your teeth and into your pjs. I’ll be up to put you to bed in a minute, okay?” Sara says to Mike once they’re through the door and they’ve kicked their shoes off by the rack. Sara will clean them up later, she tells herself, although there’s a billion and one other things higher up on her agenda than organising the shoe rack. A pair of Jacobs sports shoes and walking boots are still sat on one of the shelves, and she thinks about the clothes that are still upstairs in their closet and the smoothies that still sit in the fridge. Little bits of him sprinkled throughout the house that she’ll have to spend months getting rid of, and even then she knows she’ll find something of his ten years down the line, sitting in the back of a drawer, and it will bring back all the feelings that are fresh now. The betrayal, the guilt. Michael had been alive this whole time, fighting tooth and nail to protect the ones he loves, and Sara had been sleeping with the enemy, quite literally, this entire time. She’d let Jacob into her life, and into her sons life, and all this time he had been the one who had taken Michael away from her. If it hadn’t happened to her, she’d find it hard to believe. 

“Mom, I wanna stay up!” Mike argues, looking up at his mother with wide eyes. Sara knows that he must have lots of questions, and wanted the opportunity to get to know his real father. He’d been told, ever since he was old enough to understand, that his father was in heaven and wasn’t coming back. Very rarely was any parent forced to take words like that back. 

“Tomorrow, you can ask any questions you want and we’ll straighten this whole thing out, but for now i want you to go to bed, alright?” Mike was a good kid, so he listened to his mother and turned to head upstairs once Sara had pressed a kiss into his hair. It was only after she had watched him turn the corner and head into the bathroom, that she turned around to realise that Michael hadn’t stepped foot into the house yet. He lingered on the threshold, hands stuffed into the pockets of his jacket as he watched the interaction between his wife and son. 

“Michael, come inside. Take your shoes off.” She encouraged him, giving him a reassuring smile. She wanted him to feel comfortable, and like this was his home now, but after seven years of prison cells, she knew it would be a while before he readjusted to civilian life. He did however step inside and toe his shoes off, picking them up and placing them on the shoe rack. Sara moves past him and shuts the door, making sure the locks are in place. Even now, with Michael’s word that all of this is over, Sara can’t help but take those few precautions to make sure that her son is safe. Michael is looking around the hallway when she turns around, taking in every little detail, as he so often did. Mike’s school bag is draped over the banister, there are photos lining the wall up the stairs. Sara’s family, what it once was. She doesn’t worry about the empty spaces that will be left behind, there’s plenty of time to take new photos and make new memories. 

Placing a delicate hand on Michael’s arm to catch his attention, she looks up into his captivating eyes. She’d never been able to truly read him, not in all the years she’d known him. She was unable to gauge how he was really feeling right now. 

“I’m going to put Mike to bed, and then we can talk.” She almost considers asking him to come upstairs with him, for them to put their child to bed together for the first time, but more than that she wants to offer Michael a chance at space. She figures he probably hasn’t had a lot of that in the past almost-decade. 

Michael simply nods and places his hand over hers, squeezes gently and offers her a smile. He hasn’t spoken the whole way, and Sara doesn’t blame him. The enormity of freedom after so long must be difficult to process. Sara feels a sense of freedom too, which is odd because for seven years she hadn’t known that her life was still on the line. She had thought it was over a long time ago, had never known about this 21 Void that had been using her husband to do their bidding, with her and their child as leverage. 

Sara makes her way upstairs and into Mike’s bedroom, and sees her son has already settled himself into bed. The streetlight outside illuminates the room in a warm glow and she doesn’t turn the lamp on as she makes her way over to his bed and sits down on the edge of it. 

“Long day, huh buddy?” She whispers, pushing his brown locks out of his face and giving him a smile. 

“That man downstairs… Is he really my dad?” Mike asks, looking up at his mother with innocent eyes. Sara knows the lies he’s been told by Jacob, and wonders how long it will take her to unteach what he’d been told. “Jacob said he was a bad man.”

“Yeah, honey, he is. And I promise he’s none of those things Jacob said, okay?” She doesn’t want Mike to be scared, or to grow up looking over his shoulder, so she’s careful about what she says next. “Jacob just found out that your dad was alive and he.. He got upset, because I told him that I still loved your dad very much. He didn’t want to lose me, or you, so he just got a little upset and a little angry.” Sara knows her kid is smart, and that he probably knows that there’s more going on, but as long as they’re all safe, that’s all that really matters. Maybe one day, when he’s older, she’ll tell him stories about what a hero his dad is, and all he went through for them. “But he’s gone now, and you don’t need to worry, because we’ll never have to see him again.” She leans down and presses a kiss against his forehead. This kid. This amazing, bright, carbon copy of Michael Scofield, he means the world to her. She hasn’t quite come to terms with how close she came to losing him today. 

“You get some sleep, okay? I’ll see you in the morning. I love you so much.” Sara stands and tucks the blankets around Mike and heads to the door, pausing to look back on her son as he rolls over and curls up under the sheets. Never in her wildest dreams did she ever think she’d be putting him to bed while his dad waited downstairs. When she walks downstairs, she’s surprised to see that Michael has actually moved from the hallway and migrated into the living room. She quietens her footsteps, even though she figures that her genius husband will know he’s being watched anyway. He’s stood by the fireplace, one hand gripping the wood as he looks at the photo perched upon it. Sara, Jacob and Mike photographed together in the garden. Jacob’s hand is on her waist and both their arms are wrapped around Mike as the then five year old squints against the sun. Sara approaches him silently and wraps her arms around his waist from behind, and if he flinches neither of them say anything about it. She presses a soft kiss into his shoulder blade as he rests his hand over hers.  
“We’ll get rid of it all. I promise.” Neither of them have switched a light on yet, so she whispers into the darkness, the room lit only by the streetlights outside and the occasional passing car. Sara wants nothing more to rid their house and their lives of every trace of Jacob. She won’t forget that he ever existed, but they can try and move on from him, try to put him and the past seven years behind them. Seven years of pain, grief and secrecy. “We can do it now, or you can shower first. Whatever you want, Michael. Whatever you want.” This house was his home now, and Sara wanted nothing more for him to feel safe here. Safe like he had probably not felt in a long time.

“He was never the love of my life, you know?” She starts, coming around to face Michael, still able to catch his blue-green eyes, even in the darkness. She doesn’t know whether he wants to hear it or not, but she continues anyway. “He was nice, and he… He cared about Mike, but he never, ever made me feel the way you did. No one ever could. God, Michael. You’re like a wave, you come in and sweep up everything in your path, and then you pull away again just as fast.” When they’d fallen in love, it had been fast. With everything on line, and no future in front of them back then, it had been the only thing they could do. Michael was a wave and Sara was happy to get swept away. 

“Sara..” Michael breathes, and she can hear the start of an apology in his tone. She doesn’t need to hear it.

“Shh, shh..” Sara reaches out and presses her fingers to his lips, stopping him before he can get it out. “You don’t need to, okay? No apologies. Everything you did, you did for us. I know you wouldn’t have left us behind if you’d had a choice. You’re already forgiven. You were forgiven the second I saw you again.” Getting the news from Lincoln had of course, been a shock. Her immediate reaction after shock had been anger. Michael had been alive all this time and never reached out, but having the entire flight over to Crete had given her plenty of time to think, and to really think about the kind of person Michael Scofield was. Michael Scofield would put the whole world before himself. He would, and he had, put himself through hell for the people he loved. This was a man who had gotten himself thrown into prison to save his brother, dealt with beatings and cut off toes to get Lincoln out of Fox River. The ramifications from that break out had seen him put his life on the line so many times that Sara couldn’t really count anymore. Everything that Michael had done, had been for love. 

“I knew you’d move on. I never imagined you’d spend the rest of your life loving a dead man.” Michael looks at the photo again, and a small furrow in between his brows appears. “If Lincoln had never received that photo, if he’d never come to Yemen and found me, you would have lived the rest of your life with Jacob, none the wiser. You and Mike would have been safe, and happy.” He takes a deep breath, the kind Sara knows means he’s schooling his emotions. “I just can’t help but think that me coming back caused more problems than it solved.” 

“No, Michael.” Sara reaches for the photo frame and slams it down face first so Michael won’t look at it anymore. She puts her hands on either side of her face and forces him to look into her eyes. “I will never, ever regret having you back. Not for one second. I would have carried on like I had been, hell I might have even been happy, but not a day would have gone by that I didn’t think of you. Mike doesn’t understand now, and Jacob screwed with his head, but growing up all he ever wanted was to have his dad around. His amazing, incredible, intelligent dad that I never shut up about.” She runs her hand over his head, hair still cut to close to the scalp but scattered with specks of grey now. “Michael, this is only going to work out okay if you want to be here. Do you want to be here?” She had to know. If his feelings for her had changed in the last seven years, she wanted to hear it. 

“Yes. God, yes. Sara, more than anything. The thought of you and Mike, it’s the only thing that’s kept me going this whole time.” Everything he had done while he’d been dead had been to get back to them one day. “I’m just.. I’m not the same guy that left you. If you knew what I’d seen, the things I’ve had to do to get back to you. If you knew, you might not want me.” Sara watches him press his forehead against hers as he closes his eyes. 

“Whatever you had to do... whatever fallout you have to deal with from this, we’ll deal with it together. Remember what you told me all those years ago, that we finish this together.” Sara would deal with the nightmares, the emotional and psychical scars. Whatever burdens Michael had, Sara would help him manage the load. Just like he had done back when Sara had been dealing with what had happened to her at the hands The Company. 

“I don’t deserve you. I don’t-- Not after everything-” 

This time, Sara silences Michael with her lips, pressing them against his. She didn’t want to hear it. She was an ex-junkie, ex-convict, ex-disgraced doctor. If anything, she didn’t deserve someone as brilliant and bright as Michael Scofield. She feels Michael hesitate at first, but then an arm snakes around her waist and pulls her close, and his mouth opened up for her. The kiss turns from something to shut Michael up with, and quickly becomes more passionate and heated than Sara had anticipated. Not that she minds, and she makes no move to stop her husband from pushing her up against the fireplace, feeling the wooden beam press into her shoulder blades. His slender fingers find their way under her shirt and grip her hips hard enough to leave bruises for a couple of days. She’d wear them with pride.

Sara wants to take Michael upstairs and reunite with him properly, but the master bedroom was still tainted by Jacobs presence. The book he had been reading was placed on the bedside table, spine cracked as it sat face down on the last page he’d read. “Guest bedroom.” She mumbles against his lips, which causes Michael to pull away and raise his brows. For a smart guy, he can sometimes miss the obvious. The expression on his faces makes Sara giggle. 

“Are you sure?” Michael asks, as if waiting seven years to go to bed with the man you love isn’t long enough. Sara rolls her eyes and takes his hands, leading him to the stairs and up to the second floor. The last door on the right houses the guest bedroom, plain walls and a simple bed sheet. Clear of anything from her old life. Her new life with Michael starts tonight. Tomorrow, before they meet Lincoln and Sheba at the park, they’ll take trash bags and purge the house of Jacob Ness. The door shuts softly behind them and Sara leads him to bed. They undress each other slowly, Sara’s fingers trace Michael’s new tattoos, different from those he had when they had first met, but still as intriguing. There’s still hesitancy on Michael’s side, in the way he touches her. Like he’s afraid that she might slip through his fingers. She wonders if he dreamt of this at all in the years he’s been gone, woken up and seen the image of her fade from his mind. She knew she had, and she was ashamed to admit that on the nights she lay with Jacob, she would imagine Michael’s hands on her, and hear his voice whispering in her ear. This wasn’t a dream, this wasn’t the desperate acts of a woman who missed the man who had changed her entire life. This was as real as it could be. 

At the end of the night, when they lay in bed in the dark, their heavy breaths mingling together in the air and their sweaty bodies tangled with each other, Sara forgets that she ever lived seven years without the intoxicating feeling of Michael Scofield pressed up against her. Michael forgets that another man ever tried to lay claim to what was his.

**Author's Note:**

> My first Prison Break fic. I only watched the full season about two weeks ago absolutely fell in love with this relationship and wanted to explore it in the last episode a little more. Hope you enjoy it!


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